The Heartbreak of Joy

It is no secret to anyone that I love my work.

My Birch Network job mostly centres around supporting families living in hotel accommodation. 

There is little I can do to alleviate the things they really need help with: what they most need is not to be living in hotel accommodation, not to be waiting endlessly for decisions on their cases, not to be stuck in a system that tells them they are not wanted here. I have watched helplessly as the vibrant hope I saw in people when they arrived many months ago has slowly drained away.  

But around the edges I have done what I can. I have helped with odd things: I have got children into school, provided school uniform, passed on information, answered questions, filled in forms. I have administered endless bus tickets. I have taken the families out on a couple of fairly low key trips. I have turned up with a smile on my face and offered a listening ear. I hope in some small ways I have shown people they are welcome.

Most recently, I have started running an "after school club". I turn up once a week for a couple of hours. I bring paper, pencils and some felt tip pens, sometimes a game, ideas for activities to do together, little else. 

There are children who follow every instruction, eager to please. There are children who push the boundaries just as far as they think they can get away with, complete with cheeky grins. There are children who bicker as siblings do, and children who help each other out with kindness and generosity. There are children watching out for me who stay at my side for the duration, and children who join in for a fleeting moment then drift away. There are children who barely speak and children who barely stop! 

There are smiles and laughter and mess and a fair amount of silliness: there are children just being children.

And it brings me great joy. It is an incredibly rewarding couple of hours full of life and energy and fun. It is always nice when people are pleased when I arrive and sad when I leave. I feel deeply appreciated and loved.  

But it also breaks my heart ... 

I do nothing that really warrants the level of gratitude and appreciation I experience. Nothing that really warrants the level of joy it brings. 

These tiny things really shouldn't mean so much. It says much about their lives that they do. 

The joy in these moments is genuine. 

So is the heartbreak. 

I will sit, walk and live with both and know my life is the richer for it.

The stories we hear, and those we don't

Several weeks ago, from an already uneasy peace, violence erupted in Sudan's capital Khartoum. Against a backdrop of negotiations and supposed ceasefires, violence has continued and spread to other parts of the country. And while military leaders vie for supremacy, the innocent population suffers.

All of this made a brief appearance on the front page of the BBC news website and in various media headlines.

For a little longer, you could consistently find it if you made the effort to go to the world news pages. Now, even there, it is mostly hidden away.

While my Sudanese friends scour the internet for news of the conflict, while they try to maintain contact with loved ones, while they wait anxiously to know if those they care about are ok, while, in some cases, they hear the news they dread... the conflict has all but disappeared from our news, and probably for many people, from our consciousness. 

One of the things somebody said to me when they witnessed the outpouring of compassion in response to the Ukraine crisis last year was words to the effect of "of course people here don't care as much about us, they don't even know about the war in my country" I had little to offer by way of comfort. I knew it to be true.

And here we are again.

There has been no extended family reunion offer, no homes for Sudan scheme, no fast-track way to refugee status for the Sudanese people languishing in the asylum system. No airlines or Eurostar offering free travel tickets and safe passage, no collection boxes in every corner, no flags flying, no social media awash with the colours of Sudan. 

And yes, there have been, there are, people calling for at least some semblance of equality between those fleeing this conflict as those fleeing another, but without the same mass outpouring from all corners of society that couldn't be ignored it seems little will happen. 

I am obviously not criticising that all those things happened when Russia invaded Ukraine: it was a beautiful show of solidarity and compassion. But maybe I am questioning why they aren't happening again now. 

Do we care less? Possibly. Do we know less? certainly. Is their conflict, their suffering less? Probably not. Are their lives somehow worth less? Absolutely not.

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Two of my friends have told me about family members who have been killed. 

Another was telling me about his family moving away from Khartoum and while he is happy they are hopefully in a safer place, there is no internet or phone coverage where they have fled to, so he has lost contact and doesn't know when he will next have news of them. 

I have watched people struggle, trying not to be overwhelmed with fear and sadness, and the guilt of being safe and powerless to help.

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Someone I used to teach contacted me recently. Her sister, trapped in Khartoum, has an ill child who, due to the hospitals being either closed, or overrun or not having supplies or all of the above can't get the medical care they need.

She wanted to know what form she should fill in to bring them over here so the child could continue their treatment. If she was Ukrainian it would be that simple. And rightly so. 

Because she is Sudanese, the reality is there is nothing she or I can do. She wants, even expects me to have an answer, to have something to suggest, some grain of hope. I have forwarded her a petition,  helped her write a letter to her MP: I suspect it won't help but I guess partly I don't want to be the person to take away the little hope that something might be done, to say that my country doesn't want to help.

If that child dies for want of the medication to keep them well, they will not officially be a victim of the war. They will not officially be a victim of fortress Europe and Britain's hostile environment. In reality they will be both. 

Hers is one untold story. There will be thousands more. 

What should I say to her the next time she calls?

Making the most

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day: the sun was shining, the sky was blue and it was even actually warm. Sandwiched between dull, damp days either side it felt even more precious and needed to be savoured.

Long before some other major event was scheduled for this weekend, it was the date set for the Birmingham half-marathon and 10k run: I was very glad, for their sake that it fell on the dry day ... for many people it looked quite painful enough without any rainstorms to negotiate! Matthew, who lives on the route, had invited a few of us over for a front garden barbecue to take advantage of the road closures. I wonder what our communities would look like if traffic noise and fumes didn't mostly prevent us from gathering in front of where we live? But I digress. It was my first barbecue of the season and good food and good company out in the sunshine made it a most enjoyable way to spend a few hours. 

The previous day I had been due to take some of the families I work with to the Coronation Celebrations in the city centre. This had been quite some dilemma for me in the run-up ... I will surprise no-one by saying I am no monarchist and not in favour of all this royal nonsense. But if I could park the cause behind it, it was going to be a family-friendly festival of live music and entertainment and it felt more wrong to stand on my principles to a point of depriving people far less privileged than me the chance to be part of something fun. But then rain stopped play because no-one bar hardcore royalists could have been tempted to an outdoor party in pouring rain! 

Having worked out the timings, I figured I could comfortably fit cheering on the runners and an early-lunchtime barbecue and still take the families down to the city centre in the late afternoon sunshine. I arrived to find some of the kids already dressed-up in their party clothes and from the handful waiting at the door for me to arrive I had gathered up over thirty people by the time we set off. I did, really, very little: simply coming together with them to an open, public space: but while one or two might have done, the majority wouldn't have had the confidence (or the bus money) to get there without being accompanied. I later joked with colleagues that spending an afternoon face-painting union flags possibly counts as my most serious act of commitment to any job ever! The gratitude expressed suggests it was absolutely the right call.  

I regularly remind myself that I really enjoy walking,  so partly prompted by road closures and tempted by the sunshine, I strung the whole day together by walking between the various locations. I was able to do so mostly along quiet backstreets and canal towpaths. I really enjoy walking and chatting with friends, but I also very much enjoy the quiet solitude of walking alone, consciously being present to the physical world around me. It meant getting up and going and out a bit earlier than I might have done otherwise, but it meant that rather than being dead time in between nice things the travel became very much a nice thing in and of itself. I think I'd covered just over ten miles by the time I got back home.

When I got home it was after seven but still bright and warm, something which, after the short dark days of the winter I am determined to always remember to appreciate! So I did a job I had been on my to do list for quite some time. I'd had a few pots of daffodil bulbs on my door step, from which the flowers had long since faded. Yesterday evening I planted the bulbs into the border under the hedge at the front of my house. It remains to be seen whether or not they'll come up next spring, but despite being well aware there's a very good chance they may not, whatever, there is something inherently positive about putting your hands in soil and there is something about planting things into the land which feels like a gesture of belonging, of (literally) putting down roots, here in this place. 

None of this is a judgement: on myself or anyone else for the times when "making the most" of a day looks like not setting an alarm and doing very little, or looks like sitting in front of a computer cracking on with admin, or something else. At different times, "making the most of it" looks very different. Yesterday, for me, it looked like this.